4.5 months after top surgery

4.5 months is an odd point – but it seems worthwhile to write now, mostly because within the last couple of weeks, sensation has been returning at a faster rate. and I want to make note of that.

I was really afraid I was going to be left with a huge amount of sensation lost permanently.  That’s definitely what it felt like for a while.  Despite being fully aware that it takes months, years even, for nerves to come back in fully, or to the extent that they are going to.

It was just really uncomfortable to have something touching anywhere around my chest, because of the not feeling of the thing.  I didn’t even really want to be touching it myself, but I did / do, every day, to massage the areas around the areolas.  I worried about carrying boxes when I came back to work, but that actually was fine; I’m not using my chest as a balancing point as much as I thought I did – it’s more abs, I think.

Earlier, I’d say that there was numbness for about an inch radius around each nipple.  And it seemed to stagnate there, for a long time.  Now, I have feeling everywhere except the nipples.  Is it the same kind of feeling as before?  Not quite, at least not yet, on the right side especially.  Light touch feels normal; pressure still feels tender in a lot of spots.  I’m super happy about this progress.

Something else that is slowly changing, I’d say, is my overall expectation.  I’m still not happy with the results, and I’m sure I will eventually get a revision (nipple revisions if nothing else).  But it isn’t something that bothers me.  I’d say I went through a week (OK maybe 10 days) of being really down and disappointed, early on.  After that, it felt like, OK, it’s actually good enough, for now, so no need to keep harping on it.

I got a lot of feedback that it’d be best if I just lowered my expectations about how good it could look.  Many cis-people have weird chests, many trans-people have botched chests.  I had mixed feelings:

– I’m totally grateful for how it is, as opposed to how it was.  I am continuously happy about it, every day.  Can I be happy about it and still want it to be better?  Definitely.  It can be tough not to compare it to other chests I’ve seen, but, in general I’ve just been comparing it to how it was.  And in that regard, I’m psyched.

– It’s true that many people end up with really bad results.  And I feel angry about that, like, why aren’t the standards better yet??  But, I know nothing about it, from an anatomical perspective, and I’m sure there are so many factors that go into how well it can be executed, beyond what we commonly know about.

– I saw a lot of shirtless men this summer, and paid a lot more attention than I used to.  Many men have chests that are not quite desirable, but every one was symmetrical.  I know it’s common for women to have one breast bigger or shaped differently from the other, but I gotta say, I’ve never seen an asymmetrical cis-male chest.

Overall, I think it helps to hear that adjusting your expectation will help in the long run (even if the knee jerk reaction is something along the lines of, “butt out!”  Haha.)  I strongly believe this is happening naturally, without me trying to change the way I am thinking.

I thought that since my chest was so small, it would be easy to get it right.  Now I’m thinking, whoa, no, it’s way more complicated than that, and I barely know the first thing about it.

What I do know is that my surgeon does not offer free revisions (although the cost I was quoted, more or less, seems reasonable).  Also I know it is not a priority for the foreseeable future.  I imagine that within a year or two, I will have consulted with a few surgeons (I’d definitely hesitate to go back to my original surgeon) and I’ll be moving forward from there.  I’m in no hurry.